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The article was certainly valuable and offered a good perspective of the situation. But, the article omitted a vital component that bears strong consideration. The primary reason why there is a realistic cap on the taxation rates (corporate and individual) on all state and county governments is that there is a freedom of movement in America.

Corporations and individual families can, and have, moved out of states seen to have higher than average taxation rates. The revenue problems of states like California, Illinois, Ohio, New Jersey, and Wisconsin are complicated by a tax base exodus.

I previously analyzed tax rates in California and I reported here than a family of four making between $100,000 and $50,000 a year, had over ten percent of their total income taxed by the state's income taxes, in addition to the approximately 15 to 25% the feds took in income taxes. That meant that when you added in the municipal and county taxes brought on by property taxes, the average California family paid about half their aggregate annual income to government!

That is why the population of Nevada skyrocketed! People simply voted with their feet. And as they moved, they took 100% of their taxes with them!

Add in corporations who decided to pull stakes and relocate to the friendlier work climates of the southern states (from Arizona straight across the nation to the southeast), they also took 100% of their taxes with them!

Governor Scott Walker may not be as popular as he was two months ago, but he is still 100% right about the hard realities. The only way Wisconsin attracts new businesses and keeps existing businesses in the state is if Wisconsin's overall work environment is reasonably close to that of the southern states. Furthermore, if his gamble proves right and his revised tax and business climate in Wisconsin does fuel an increase in state jobs (he estimates 250,000) then he will be a hero and be re-elected!

To the union people of Wisconsin, let me pose a simple and profound question: What is better? Lower benefits and retirement packages, or unemployment? In my view, Walker's 250,000 job estimate is already on the positive move by the numbers of union jobs saved by the legislation he just signed into law!

From the article, I thought this excerpt laid out the realities very nicely:

The new Wisconsin law, for example, is sweeping. It ends collective bargaining for state workers, except on base wages. It makes negotiated pay raises above inflation subject to approval by voters in a statewide referendum. It requires unions to hold recertification votes annually and ends the practice of withholding union dues on employee paycheques.

Can anyone really rationally argue against pay raises above inflation being put before the votes of the people who's taxes fund the salaries? Can anyone really rationally argue against unions being required to stand before an annual vote of their own members to let the members determine if said union effectively represents them? Can anyone really rationally argue against the notion that people have an inviolate right to not have their personal property taken from them involuntarily and given to others whom they don't support?

Unions are losing support nationwide because their actions and agitations have gotten out of rational bounds. No one, certainly myself, supports outright abuse and neglect. However, state employees in these union-dominated states make more salary, pay far less for their benefits, and retire with far more lavish lifetime pensions than the people who provide the financial basis of these incomes! That alone illustrates the mandate nationwide to rein in unions, and frankly to hold union membership accountable to their own represented employees!

Missing in most of these news columns and analysis are honest looks at the very real level of union employee discontent with their own union leaderships! Much of what we see in Wisconsin are the desperate last gasps of powerful union leaders who get paid an average of $500,000 to $250,000 a year salaries -- all of it funded by union dues collected without the consent of their members!